A/N: Luke's POV

It was the eleventh day when things started to feel like the Hunger Games again.

After the lack of death or events since watching Hanna getting eaten by lizards, it was all I could do not to allow myself to get lulled into a false sense of security. I would not be caught off guard. I would not give Draven or Charlotte or anybody else that sort of competitive advantage. I'd given Catriona far too much of an advantage, catching me asleep, but that I couldn't help so much. It could still be over a week to the end, and I wasn't going to try to stay awake for it all.

That would have been a much surer death sentence, and I was looking for no such thing.

I'd yet to find water, but Finnick had ensured that I hadn't needed to, and I had plenty of food with my seemingly foolproof method of hunting lizards. Once I'd gotten into the swing of things, it really wasn't so bad.

I hadn't seen a tribute in days, which I didn't mind so much, except that it was eerie. There weren't too many of us left, yes, and there was still an alliance out there, somewhere, as far as I knew, but it was still disconcerting.

What was more disconcerting, though, was what I found when I did find signs of what one might call life.

I was still looking for water, although without much in the way of hope for finding it, when I stumbled across what I thought was a corpse in the middle of the deserts.

Daisy wasn't dead yet, I realized as she looked up at me with hollow but living eyes, but she was on death's door.

"When was the last time you ate?" I asked her, sitting down beside the virtual skeleton, noting skin rashes, sunburn, and even places where lizards had taken a chunk of skin in passing, looking for better meat to feast on.

"I don't remember," she muttered. Her skin was dry and cracking, I noticed, especially her lip.

There was no other diagnosis: she was starving to death, and even if I could have saved her (which I couldn't have), it was better for me and her both to just let her die.

"Luke," she rasped, swallowing with some difficulty. "Luke, Charlotte made him leave me. She... she wanted to kill me, but he wouldn't let her."

I assumed that 'he' was Draven.

"Why not?" I asked.

"I don't know," she managed to choke out. "But they didn't leave me anything. I can't even move, Luke, it hurts."

I didn't know what to do. Part of me said to put her out of her misery, but if Draven couldn't or would do that, then what would that make me? I decided only to do so if she asked, but I couldn't just leave her. What if she decided later she wanted someone to do her in but no one was there to help? So I sat down on the sand beside her, knife at the ready both in case of attack and in case she asked me to relieve her of the pain.

"Would you rather he'd killed you?" I asked softly.

"No," she rasped.

I nodded, knowing that I couldn't kill her after that, and I took her sun-burned hand, holding it as tenderly as I could.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" she asked. "It feels so close."

With slight hesitation, I nodded and said, "You're beyond my skill to heal, Daisy, even if I had everything I needed."

She probably would have nodded if she'd had the strength. Instead, she just looked up at me with her hollow eyes and said, "Okay."

Well, that was that, I supposed, and all that was left was to wait. I didn't know too much about death by natural causes. She was weak. Perhaps her heart would stop first, or she wouldn't have the strength to breathe. I didn't really know how it worked, but I had a feeling it would be her heart that would stop. The least I could do was keep the lizards from hurting her body any more than they had.

"Whatever you do," she rasped as her eyes fluttered closed again, "don't let Charlotte beat you."

"I certainly wasn't planning on it," I whispered, stroking her matted hair. "Don't worry, I'll do whatever I can."

She didn't say anything after that, but a barely perceptible smile crossed her lips and I knew she felt at least a bit contented. I couldn't help but feel pleased that she wouldn't die a horrible, violent death like the rest. I hoped we were on screen, because I hoped her family would get to see that she wasn't dying alone.

It took a while for the cannon to sound, but when it did, I took a deep breath, wiped the sand off my face with my sleeve, and petted her hair once more. Then I lifted her fingers to my lips, horrified at how light her arm was, even with the weight of death on her body, and I kissed her knuckles.

"I'm sorry I came too late," I sighed, hoping the cameras couldn't hear me, but fairly sure they could.

I stood, grabbing the knife Draven had left beside her, and heading away so the hovercraft could pick up the body.

It didn't get any easier, I realized, even toward the end. I hadn't killed her, but I hadn't even tried to save her. What did that make me?

Another pawn?

Weak?

Strong?

I felt terrible, like a terrible human being, but another tribute just meant another person to kill or be killed by later, and that wasn't something I relished.

Besides, I couldn't afford to use precious resources on someone I knew I couldn't keep alive... could I?

I had sponsors, yes, but did I have enough sponsors to feed and water the both of us? Even if I did, would they do it?

Daisy's face was the only one in the sky on the eleventh night. It wasn't too terribly surprising.

There were no faces on the twelfth night.

I had done nothing that day, as I always was. I hunted lizards. I looked for water that I was becoming more and more sure didn't exist. I received another sponsor gift from Finnick: water and fruit. There was even a roll tucked in there, probably rewarding me for my handling of Daisy. Maybe it had gotten me a few more sponsors or something. Maybe Finnick had just thought it was the right thing to do.

That seemed like something Finnick would do, or even Mags.

The roll was appreciated, whatever the reasoning, and it was especially nice that I had the water and fruit to go with it, since my mouth was so dry all the time. It hadn't even been two weeks, and I could still have more than a week to go. The smaller the number of tributes, the longer it took between kills. We started to spread out across the arena, and we wouldn't be drawn together unless there were several days without action or that it got down to the final two.

I wasn't sure in that moment whether I wanted to make it to the final two or not. The chances that I would be able to face Draven or Charlotte by the final day, whenever it finally came along, didn't seem too bright that day. The other thing I had to keep reminding myself, though, was that they were bound to be more depleted by the time that day came, as well. After all, if they were already depositing their allies to get rid of mouths to feed, they obviously weren't bringing in enough food to feed them adequately.

I wondered vaguely if Maggie was still with them, or if Charlotte had wanted to kill her, too, and Draven left her somewhere else to die of starvation. Why hadn't Draven just killed Daisy? I asked myself the question over and over without any real answer to come up with. He hadn't killed Catriona, either. He could have killed Daisy easily, and Catriona with a struggle. I knew he was capable of it, so why hadn't he agreed with Charlotte and narrowed the field? He would have gone home sooner, possibly.

Or maybe it wouldn't make any difference in the end, I thought, curling up for the night under the arena sky, vaguely wondering where in Panem we actually were, even though it didn't really matter. If I died, it didn't matter where I'd died. If I lived, I'd never want to think of my own arena ever again. I'd be too busy focusing on the arenas of my tributes I would have to mentor, anyway. No time for thinking of my arena.

My arena. It would only be mine if I won, I reminded myself, trying to use my pack as a pillow of sorts. If I won.

On the morning of the thirteenth day, I woke to dark skies. At first I thought it was still night, but I realized eventually that it was just a trick of the arena, sort of like clouds with no hope of rain. I knew better than to hope for some sort of help from the Gamemakers. If there would be rain, it would be acid or some form of poison, not any sort of nourishment. Maybe they intended to drown us all.

But somehow I doubted that.

So without knowing what they had in store, I woke up, stretched, and gathered my things to continue my cynical, hopeless search for clean drinking water.

I hoped that Finnick and my sponsors were admiring my tenacity, because I was starting to think it was something closer to naive optimism, or possibly the beginnings of insanity. I didn't particularly want to end up like Catriona, so I was trying to push the possibility of insanity away.

I was finally contented by not seeing other tributes, although I remained on alert. Sure, it was hard to sneak up on someone in the desert, but there were no shifting leaves anywhere to give away an approaching tribute. But the land was relatively flat with a few dunes and boulders keeping us from seeing the whole of the arena, and possibly distance itself, which played such tricks on the eye and depth perception.

Nobody would sneak up on me, I reassured myself, at least not without getting a knife to the throat.

Except for Draven, I recalled, thinking of the lasso he showed me during the training. He could sneak close enough to rope me with a lasso and have me at his mercy before I had a chance to toss a knife in his direction.

Lunchtime was just as dark as breakfast, and Finnick sent me my rations for the day as usual, with fruit and water, and I hunted down some lizard as I searched for water.

I was beginning to refer to walking around as "searching for water" in my mind, because it all lead to the same end. There was no water. Somewhere in me I knew it, but I had to keep walking just to do something, so I might as well tell myself that was what I was doing. It was as good as anything else, and it felt good to think I had a purpose.

When I finally made a spot to sleep that night, looking up to find that, as I already knew, nobody died that day, I knew the next day would bring something terrible. The Gamemakers didn't let the lack of carnage go on long before adding in their own infusion of action. I just didn't want to think about what that might be in the hell our arena was. I curled up into a ball with one of my knives in hand. I had to be ready to no matter what it was.

Of course the fourteenth day wasn't as dramatic as some might have hoped, but there was a death.

I woke up in the morning, same as I had been for two weeks, a knife in hand and the hot sun of the arena overhead, pushing me onwards about my day.

"Well," I muttered to myself, "at least it's not gotten any worse."

How it could have worsened, I wasn't sure. There were ways, of course. The clouds that had cooled the arena the day before were gone, without having dropped any rain, and it seemed as though the desert was drier than ever.

Of course that probably wasn't true. It was probably impossible for that arena to get any drier than it had been all along, but my body was gradually depleting itself of its usual amount of water and Finnick's gifts were unable to properly keep me going for too long. Eventually, I'd still get too weak to really keep going. I wasn't sure how long it would be, but as long as the water kept coming I would probably not die of thirst before the end of the Games. If I died, it would be from someone's weapon or the teeth of the lizards.

More likely someone's weapon, and most likely Draven's, whatever weapon he was using.

In spite of the drier feeling, I went off in my usual hopeless search for water and hopeful search for lizards to eat. I walked through the arena, one tired foot in front of the other, wishing that the lizards would just eat everyone else so it would be over and I could just go home. I was half tempted to just let the lizards eat me. It might be better than wandering through the endless sand, searching for water I knew didn't exist.

Wandering was uneventful, mostly. I found some lizards, and managed to use my practiced hunting technique to kill two of the smaller ones, which I cooked just enough to know they were safe to eat before stomping out the fire and eating them on the move.

Around midday, my daily gift from Finnick arrived with water and fruit, and a couple of strips of dried beef.

"Thank you, Finnick," I sighed, drinking a few mouthfuls of the water, saving the rest for later in the day. I never liked to drink it all at once, mostly for comfort's sake.

I continued on my way, and the sun was just going to the other side of the sky when I came across a rather large grouping of lizards.

Poised to toss my knife, with one hand in my pocket, feeling for the stones I carried for just such an occasion, I jumped slightly at the sound of the cannon firing and I watched the lizards scatter. I was just about to curse whoever had died when I saw the body of Anselm laying in the sand where the lizards had been.

The body looked similar to Daisy's, but not quite as thin.

Thirst, I realized. He'd died of thirst.

The thought was unnerving, but I reminded myself that if things continued as they'd been going, there was no way I'd die of thirst.

Still, I looked at his body for a moment, trying to memorize what a person looked like when they died of thirst. I didn't want to forget, just in case that ended up being me someday soon.

I decided that it looked more painful to die of hunger.

Hunger Games.

I wondered, as I walked away so that the hovercraft could pick him up, if more people had died of hunger or thirst in the Hunger Games. They probably kept record of the statistics of such matters, but I probably didn't want to know the answer, anyway. It was all fairly depressing.

But what part of my situation wasn't depressing? All right, so there were obviously people enjoying it in the Capitol or the whole spectacle wouldn't happen year after year, but I was beginning to understand what Finnick had said about how I shouldn't feel honored to be representing my District. Where was the honor in what I was being forced to do, win or lose?

The wandering the rest of the day felt even more hopeless and aimless than usual, and I was glad when the arena sun started to sink on the horizon. I quickly found a suitable place to make my camp for the night and situated myself, doing little more than waiting for the face of Anselm to greet me on the sky of the arena, the last time I would see it if I lost, the last time I would see it as it was before he died if I won.

I wasn't sure which was more comforting a thought.

Either way, I watched his face as it lit up the arena sky and thought over the few people who still stood between me and home. Draven, Charlotte, Maggie... Was that really all that was left?

No, Alexander, from Nine. Alexander was still alive.

I wondered who would die next, if maybe it would be me.

But then I remembered my promise to Daisy as she was dying. Charlotte couldn't win. No matter what I did, I had to make sure Charlotte didn't win.

I had a purpose again, I thought with a smile. There was still no water, no matter how much I tried looking for it, but there was Charlotte and there was my promise. When morning came, I decided, I would go on a hunt for Charlotte instead of water, and maybe, just maybe I would find a way to win, or at least I would manage to kill her.

Because Daisy was right. Charlotte didn't deserve to win if she treated her allies that way, the way my allies had treated me.

And once I had killed Charlotte or found out she was dead, I would kill Draven, I decided as I drifted off to sleep.